Tweeting a grown-up game for preschool students

25/02/2012 22:22

Egalitarian Oui!, Novel Oui!, Functional Non!

Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above.


FRENCH preschoolers near Bordeaux are posting daily updates to the micro-blogging website Twitter under their class’ handle, camusmat04, despite not yet knowing how to read or write.

Since the start of the school year, the 29 children have posted short messages of 140 characters or less about a daily activity to a joint Twitter feed, which has 88 followers, most of them parents.

……The children’s teacher came up with the idea to teach them to recognise the alphabet in different formats – cursive, keyboard, screen – and to learn to move from oral to written word.

Each day the process is the same: the children propose topics and vote on a winner. All pupils then try their hand at writing a tweet, before the teacher combines them into a final post that two children type into the computer.

We love writing on the computer like grown-ups,’‘ said five-year-old Emma.

Teacher Philippe Guillem said the goal was not just to teach the children but parents as well. About 80 per cent of the parents have agreed to follow the class Twitter account, where at the start of the year only one had subscribed to the service and only a handful had Facebook profiles
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Tess Michaels